Each one of these events has attained international relevance, playing a fundamental role in the sales of brands everywhere. Yet in the race to capitalize on them, many campaigns fall short of their true potential—whether they know it or not. The fact is, Black Friday can be much more than a one-off event to boost your sales for a few days. It’s a priceless opportunity to establish a lasting relationship with consumers all year long. 

Experiences That Stand on Their Own

A lot has been said about how to gear up for Black Friday—and with good reason. Its massiveness has turned the event into an advertising frenzy that spans a myriad of categories, products and services, which make it increasingly hard for a brand to stand out. As a response, sales are now popping up weeks before the event—to the point where some argue that Black Friday has long moved beyond its original meaning. 

But if anything, these changing dynamics stress the importance of enhancing the customer experience and establishing a relationship that will last far longer than the event itself. “You’re not only competing with other brands; you’re also competing against ad fatigue,” explains Platforms Lead Brook Downton.

A good example of this is what Tmall did for Singles’ Day. In the lead-up to the event, the Chinese website for online retail launched an immersive art exhibition where they showcased eight limited-edition collections from leading brands in the form of NFTs. In putting these experiences together, it’s not imperative to keep Black Friday at the center of it all. The ultimate goal is to provide an added value for consumers, so approach it with a customer-first mindset and let the event be merely the amplifier of an experience that stands on its own. 

Getting to Know Your Consumers

By the start of the Black Friday season, you should have a clear idea of who your consumers are, their behavior and nuances. But if your marketing efforts go according to plan, you can expect a significant influx of new data during these days—both from new and existing consumers. Knowing how to leverage the new data can help you carry this momentum forward, and provide tools you’ll fall back on in the quieter months of the year.

“At this stage, good data management is the equivalent of remembering our conversations with people,” says Gastón Fossati, VP of Data Growth, LATAM at Media.Monks. Having control over this data will bring your consumers’ needs into sharper focus. And when it comes to new shoppers, don’t look at Black Friday as the end of something; rather, as the start of an ongoing strategy. “In this scenario, the conversion already happened, it’s the opposite of what we’re used to,” says Downton. “Have a follow-up moment, acknowledge that new engagement and start building from there.”

That first touchpoint after Black Friday can take many forms, but Downton recommends giving consumers the opportunity to reconfirm their desire to connect with your brand and exchange information. In doing so, it’s important to demonstrate the value exchange that you offer—that is, the more personalized suite of services and benefits that having accurate data can lead to. 

Paving the Way for an Ongoing Relationship

Once the consumer has shown true enthusiasm about engaging with your brand, you can move forward with other marketing efforts, such as a cross-selling strategy. “Considering the products that your consumer already bought to recommend others is a great way to better serve your audience with a more personalized experience,” says Fossati. “It can also be helpful to have a model in place to predict their lifetime value, which will help you focus on the consumers with more potential.”

This point illustrates that the difference between a brand that waits for Black Friday to see their sales ramp up and one that builds on this date to maintain a consistent cycle lies in data management. In order to continue to reap the benefits of Black Friday weeks after the event, it’s important to nurture your relationship with consumers—something you can’t do unless you show up for them and provide real value.

Traditional data practices are en route to disappearing—and while working on a first-party strategy may feel daunting, that shouldn’t be the case. For most brands, the only thing preventing them from truly regaining control over their data is a matter of priorities. Knowing that Google will block third-party cookies in 2023, there’s still a misconception that developing a first-party data strategy is not urgent, when in fact, it’s never been more relevant. 

Now is the time to invest in modern solutions that provide valuable insights. While planting the seeds of anticipation with marketing campaigns and exclusive sales is essential, there’s as much to be done—if not more—after Black Friday. This year, aim at making data-driven decisions that incentivize consumers to keep coming back for more, and you’ll have the key to a consistent sales cycle.

Previously, you’d have to turn to separate platforms to measure different types of data: Universal Analytics is focused on web analytics, while Firebase—the app development platform Google acquired in 2014—focused on apps and offered less robust reporting. What made working with both platforms challenging is that their data structures are altogether different (think Adobe Analytics vs Google Analytics), with variables and metrics that just don't line up.

Now joining web and app data together, GA4 is here to stay—and it’s time you began thinking ahead on how to implement it into your existing solutions. There’s no question as to whether you should migrate from UA to GA4; if you don’t set up GA4 now, you’ll lose the chance to collect that historical data. 

And while there are many new features and benefits to GA4, there’s one place in particular I recommend you begin with: dual tagging. Dual tagging means deploying GA4 parallel to your existing UA tags. Let’s run through some important points you should know as you get started integrating GA4 into your setup.

Start Out with Event Mapping

Most importantly, be aware that the current UA data model is built on sessions, whereas the new GA4 data model is built on events. That means to migrate your data from UA to GA4, you’re going to want to create an updated measurement plan which details the mapping of all important variables.

Essentially, all our trusted UA events will be mapped to GA4 events and event parameters. And all the legacy hit types like social, page view, transaction fall under an “event” in GA4. This makes the tracking more robust and allows you to report on all types of legacy data points in one report, because now they are all events.

Another point worth discussing is the death of the event category, action and label. Those are dead to you, adios amigos! Instead, your original event action now becomes the name of your event, while the event category and event label become parameters if you so choose (or not, if you’re using gtag.js).  

Left unattended, this could lead to a colossal data scramble, depending on your event action values, ie: “click.” In my experience with Dual Tagging, I often merge the event action and category as my event name and the event label slots into an event parameter with a more descriptive value than “event_label.” The GA4 events represent one action, so it can be more granular than the historical UA event, which at times encapsulates a range of actions. I’d recommend working with a partner like Media.Monks to discuss your measurement plan before your march ahead. Now is a great time to reset your data strategy and clean up your reporting. Write off the technical debt; you can’t break a dashboard that doesn’t exist. 

If you’re using gtag.js, note that once you implement GA4, your GTag code is automatically mapped to GA4, like this:

Setting Custom Dimensions

With that in mind, let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at our UA Custom Dimensions. You won't see “session” scope listed when you map custom dimensions—that scope does not currently exist. If you want to track user attributes, also called User Properties, they should be mapped to “Custom Dimensions, user scope.” And don’t get User Properties confused with Account Properties, which are two totally different things. (The naming could have been better on that one!)

There is also one new step in GA4: you have to map your custom dimensions in the GA4 UI.  Otherwise you won’t see the data in your reports.

Change Your Perception on Sessions

I also wanted to let you know that sessions themselves are now counted differently. A UTM parameter change won't start a new session! Nor will a late-night session that crosses over midnight. Sessions in GA4 are restarted only after 30 minutes of inactivity, just like in Universal Analytics. That means your session counts are going to be lower in GA4 if you try to compare reports directly to UA (don’t do that!).

Setting up Dual Tagging is a must, right now. Don’t delay in enabling that GA4 property.  It can all be done via the GA interface, and you can have pageviews and five other events firing out of the box (like scroll, downloads, exit links, internal search and YouTube interactions)! 

However, take your finger off the trigger before setting up your custom event tracking. We do not recommend directly mapping UA to GA4. You will need to carefully think through a new measurement plan, as mentioned above. It doesn’t mean you will start from scratch (although if you’ve wanted to do that, now is the perfect opportunity). There are a set of recommended events Google encourages you to use because future reporting and features will be based on them; for example, account signup is “sign_up.” If you don’t take time to think through how the data will appear in your reporting, along with the mapping and your variable quotas for the standard GA4, you could seriously regret your haste come six months.

The variable quota can be found in your GA4 dashboard if you can’t remember how many you’ve created:

And that’s it—you’ve taken your first steps in getting acquainted with GA4. Again, the suite solves the crucial challenge of aligning your web and app measurements, fueling insights everywhere your audience turns within your owned platforms. Setting up GA4 sooner rather than later will help you future proof and collect greater historical data, so don’t wait—but if you need some help, you know who to call!

How Do I Know It’s Working?

I recently talked to an advertiser for an enterprise software product who was leveraging target account marketing on LinkedIn to reach executive-level decision makers. He told me it “wasn’t working.” When I asked him, “what do you mean when you say it isn’t working?” he responded that it wasn’t generating any leads. I looked at his campaigns, and saw that he was showing ads to VPs and CXOs, driving them to a free demo signup page.

Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes for a moment: A senior executive isn’t interrupting their day to click on an ad from a company they’ve never interacted with, and then immediately signing up for a demo with a salesperson without interacting with any other content on the site. Heck, even a junior employee doing research for a senior executive probably wouldn’t request a sales demo without doing significantly more research than reading one ad and one landing page. Saying that these LinkedIn campaigns “don’t work” is like throwing a cheetah in a swimming pool with a dolphin and calling it slow when it loses a swim race.

Think Like a Customer

Last year we invested in a single sign on software (SSO) to enhance our company’s digital security. Our CEO was the ultimate decision-maker on the purchase and gave signoff on the investment, but there was no chance that he would take 30 minutes listening to a demo pitch. He assigned our Director of Technology to lead the evaluation process. That director did demo four different software platforms before ultimately making a recommendation that our CEO approved.

Ok fine, but then why worry about showing our CEO an ad at all? When our CEO tasked that director with leading the evaluation process, he mentioned that he knew Company A and Company B had offerings that were worth evaluating. So before any serious research took place, two of the four spots for consideration were decided. Influencing our CEO’s likelihood of mentioning, remembering, or just being aware of Company A and Company B is exactly why you show him an ad even if he’s never going to convert on a demo offer.

Evaluate the Right Way

So how should you evaluate success? That depends on what marketing tactic you’re using and what it is meant to accomplish. Or, continuing the metaphor from before, whether it was designed to sprint in the plains or swim in the ocean, so to speak.

If you imagine yourself as the SSO software marketer trying to influence our CEO, you should first divvy up targeting between prospecting and remarketing for evaluators and influencers. Each of the four segments would have a different measure for success.

If you’re getting in front of CXOs and driving heavy site engagement and lots of return visits, you’ve won. How much would you pay for the CEO of one of your top 500 target accounts to come to your site, spend five minutes clicking around, seeing that you are a leader on a recent Gartner report (or any other prominent award), and then download an ungated asset? For many B2B companies, that’s probably worth $500+. So who cares if you’ve spent $5,000 with two conversions if you’re driving killer engagement left and right?

The purchase funnel continues to get more complex. You’re rarely going to hit a home run on the first pitch, so start to weigh the walks and singles that ultimately lead to scoring runs. If you’re evaluating the right metrics and not giving up on channels and tactics for the wrong reasons, you’re going to end up with more deals and revenue, and those are the ultimate success metrics.

Learn more on how our performance.monks can help with these tough challenges as they arise.